NeTS: Small: New Abstractions for First-hop Networking in Cloud Data Centers

This project seeks to improve the performance of future data center compute servers and networks, enabling a growing number of performance-sensitive applications to co-exist on each server. To allow multiple applications on a server to drive the Network Interface Card (NIC) at high speed, this research aims to rethink the mechanisms employed in various layers of the server networking stack, and create new interfaces and abstractions between the layers and for applications.

This research will lead to improved scalability, utilization, and efficiency of cloud computing infrastructure, allowing providers to support many more applications and tenants while maintaining their current infrastructure footprint.

This project seeks to develop new algorithms and programming abstractions for server operating systems and Network Interface Cards (NICs) to improve scheduling of outbound network traffic. These algorithms will overcome current performance bottlenecks, and will improve the ability for multiple applications to drive a NIC at high speed, with the ambitious goal of sustaining line rates while meeting application latency/throughput/fairness objectives as well as infrastructure-wide utilization and efficiency objectives.

The PIs plan to integrate the proposed research into courses at UW-Madison. The PIs will organize various `network programming bootcamps' aimed at network engineers, undergraduate students, and high school students from under-represented groups.